A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

He ordered killings as easily as he ordered linguine.

Once I decide to do something, I can't have people telling me I can't. If there's a roadblock, you jump over it, walk around it, crawl under it.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Both Kennedy and Obama exuded a dash of glamour in their roles as commander-in-chief and became the darlings of Hollywood. As president, each brought to the White House a fashionable and accomplished First Lady, two adorable young children and scene-stealing pets.

Gay marriage has jumped out of the closet on to the front page. Everyone from the president of the U.S. to retired four-star general Colin Powell is embracing the issue, now supported by most Americans. Still, a few people, like former First Lady Laura Bush appear to be conflicted.

I admired Eugene McCarthy's courage and although I left his Senate staff after four years to accept a job as the researcher on the editorial page of the 'Washington Post,' I remained an admirer.

I am what is known as a benched Catholic and disillusioned by the church doctrine. I believe in things the Catholic Church does not believe in: divorce being one, and a women's right to choose being another.

I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).

I don't give you editorial control. I want to meet you. I want to interview everybody who's ever known you. I want to see your correspondence. I want to see your bank statements. But you will have no control over what I write. That's why I really believe in the unauthorized biography.

I tend to place my own value in spirituality rather than religiosity.

I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress... It's like a secret society up there.

I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed that Katharine Carr Esters claims that she was 'tricked' into divulging her true feelings about Oprah and that she now denies that she revealed to me the identity of Oprah's biological father.

John F. Kennedy brought style and charisma to the White House and a first family that captivated the country: a handsome, witty president, an elegant first lady, and two adorable young children.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to ensure fair pay for women in the workplace. In addition, he succeeded in getting a measure passed to end discrimination against gays in the military.

People forget that unauthorized does not mean untrue and authorized does not mean authentic.

Presidents often disappoint, but first ladies rarely do.

Shortly after Senator Eugene J. McCarthy died in 2005 the age of 89, I became an honorary member of the committee starting a fellowship in McCarthy's name at his alma mater, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.

The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.

There's still time for redemption if I live long enough, don't you think?

When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 as her father's rightful heir, she laid upon him the mantle of Camelot and the enduring mystique of John F. Kennedy, who, according to polls, continues to be America's most beloved president.

While many applauded Oprah for opening her heart to young girls in South Africa, some criticized her for not investing in the youth of America.

I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.

I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused. I make this apology to my neighbors and my constituents, but I make it particularly to my wife, Huma.

I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.

We inadvertently bombed the Chinese Embassy. But Clinton now is working very hard. He has sent a letter of apology to the Chinese. And, he's also given them a gift certificate for future nuclear secrets.

It will never do to plead sin as an excuse for sin, or to attempt to justify sinful acts by pleading that we have an evil heart. This instead of being a valid apology, is the very ground of our condemnation.

Maturity is the ability to reap without apology and not complain when things don't go well.

An apology for the actions of some troops who, of course, are not representative of the majority of the armed forces here, I think that would have been useful and it would have helped to some extent.

My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.

An apology might help, but you can change your life without one.

Friends are God's apology for relations.

If Bush said just once: 'Boy. I hope you accept my apology as a country,' or showed some humanity.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Cheyenne Autumn was received not too successfully. I still think it was a very good movie. It was kinda Ford's apology for the way he had treated Indians in his past pictures.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.

I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

If God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

I got bad calls every match, and I never got an apology. So I thought it was rather strange.

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

First off, I'm not a scientist, and I make no apology for that.

I want to express my deepest apology to the athletes, the people of Salt Lake City in Utah and the millions of citizens worldwide who love and respect the games.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.